How To Market Steem Apps In Countries Like Finland

This is based on my knowledge of the culture of Finland as a native of that country and my experiences of bringing up Steem among my friends and acquaintances. Much of this is probably universally applicable. The blockchain itself does not need marketing except to app developers. But the apps need to be marketed to end users.

When @tarazkp and I met over lunch yesterday, one of the things that we (briefly) discussed was how Steem apps should be marketed and how they should not be marketed. I told him how the reactions I got were mostly negative because many of my friends and acquaintances had great difficulty wrapping their minds around where the value comes from. It is my conviction that it would be utterly useless and, in fact, very counterproductive to try and convince them by confusing them with any kind of intellectually dishonest marketing tactics or talking in circles. I've had one self-appointed Steem Ambassador try that on me and I found it highly irritating. People can sense snake oil salesmen from a mile away and if you do that you will cause them to instantly turn a deaf ear to you. What you should do is explain that the value proposition of Steem is exactly the same as that of any other content delivery platform on the Internet: the monetization of attention. The fact that there are no advertisements means that the platform is in such an early stage that investor money pays the bills.

During our discussion, @tarazkp said most of the end users of the future will not care about decentralization of the blockchain but that they would care about the possibility to earn. I pointed out that it would be mathematically impossible for most people to earn anything on the platform (the implication being that there would be no external revenue streams). Taraz said that the potential to earn would be a selling point. That's true but without significant external revenue streams we'd end up with a very high churn rate as most new users would be disappointed by their near total lack of rewards. People intuitively grok this when Steem is introduced to them which is a problem from a marketing point of view. And even if they assume that some type of external revenue such as ad revenue is already in place, in which case the system would not be essentially a pyramid scam, some have said that they are not interested in "pennies" that can be made on the platform.

There is one unique angle which I haven't heard from anyone, yet. It is that with large crowds and advertisers and promoters paying the bills, a system that pays it's users dividends is actually a co-operative. If it is blockchain-based it only means that its governance and internal bureaucracy have been automated to a very high degree. Now, this is an angle that could actually work because, in Finland and to my knowledge its Scandinavian neighbours, co-operatives dominate retail. In Finland, the S group and the K group are very large players in retail. Retailers and customers are all shareholders. A very large share of the profits are returned to the customers in the form of discounts based on loyalty points.

The Nordic mentality is very egalitarian and wealth disparities are frowned upon. They exist, of course, as there are extremely wealthy individuals among Nordic people. But they never show off their wealth in public. If any Nordic billionaire let their money show like some do in the English-speaking world, it would be considered totally disgraceful. When marketing Steem apps, the extreme wealth of Mark Zuckerberg (net worth $78 billion - the fucker got it by selling our digital identities) could be mentioned and the target audience asked if they thought it was in any way reasonable, fair or a proper basis for a just society that Facebook was worth $600 billion and its founder $78 billion. A blockchain-based content delivery platform like Steem, on the other hand, works like a co-operative where all parties involved are stakeholders.